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Re: Porting waveforms out of Mathematica and into a D/A converter

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg75365] Re: Porting waveforms out of Mathematica and into a D/A converter
• From: AeRobert <do.not at reply.nonet>
• Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 05:18:40 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: University Of Oxford, England
• References: <f0pkr5$27t$1@smc.vnet.net>

hot water wrote:
> Porting waveforms out of Mathematica and into a D/A converter
> 
> I have an application where I want to take mathematical curves
> generated in Mathematica and port them into a D/A converter. I would
> use regular signal generators but that will take a very long time for
> my medical ultrasound application.
> 
> Any suggestions?

What frequency?

The most easily available D/A convertor is the sound output of your 
Computer Mathematica already has functions set up for that, but of
course the bandwidth is limited - to 20kHz (for a good sound card,
less for typical built in ones).
For higher frequencies you will need to get a specific D/A device,
which come as PC cards and USB devices.  There's several suppliers
who's usual focus is "data acquisition" so use that as a search term.
They usually provide some basic sofware that allows you to test all
the functions of the card, but rarely in a user friendly or extensive
way - so you will probably need to consider the whole system of hardware
& software. (Amplicon might be a firm to start with and then, once you
have the jargon, search engine for more)

I'm assuming you intend to generate a string of nummbers describing
a wave form in Mathematica - they could be exported to a file in any
format you fancy - then "played" out to a sounder.

My experience is getting dated - I can do this kind of stuff working
in MS-DOS environments - there are perfectly good compilers to
write the necessary software freely available in the public domain.

Robert
Oxford, UK
robert-dot-paynter-at-virgin-dot-net